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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Working Paper 2008-07
Todd Swanstrom Saint Louis University
Delivered at the Urban Affairs Association Annual MeetingBaltimore, MD
April 25, 2008
Regional Resilience:A Critical Examination of the Ecological Framework
MACARTHUR FOUNDATIONRESEARCH NETWORK ONBUILDING RESILIENT REGIONS
Regional Resilience: A Critical Examination of the Ecological Framework
By
Todd Swanstrom Saint Louis University
Delivered at the Urban Affairs Association Annual Meeting
Baltimore, MD April 25, 2008
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The different responses of New York City to the terrorist attacks in 2001 and New
Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have focused the attention of scholars on
the ability of metropolitan areas to recover from disasters (Savitch 2008; Vale and
Campanella 2005). In the case of New York City, despite dire warnings that people
would flee urban settings that were vulnerable to terrorist attacks, the real estate market
in lower Manhattan revived and is now as vibrant as ever. The painful memory remains,
but the city has recovered from its wounds (Savitch 2008). New Orleans is another story.
The immediate response to the hurricane was often uncoordinated and ineffectual. The
long-run recovery has been slow and uneven. The population of the city is still only at
about 72 percent of its pre-Katrina level and while the levees have been repaired they
have not been built to withstand a category 5 hurricane like Katrina. It is still uncertain
as to whether the city will recover enough to sustain the dynamic culture in food, music,
and the arts that flourished before Katrina.
The word that is increasingly used to describe successful responses to disasters
like these is “resilience.” Resilience is an idea that can also be applied to slowly
developing challenges as well as sudden disasters (Foster n.d.). Indeed, a good case
could be made that in our fast-moving, global economy resilience is quality that all
metropolitan areas need to thrive. Every metropolitan area faces challenges, like
economic restructuring, high rates of immigration, environmental deterioration, water
shortages, and the new geography of poverty. No metropolitan area can rely on its legacy
of past successes to succeed in the future. Arguably, what matters most is not how
successful a metropolitan area is in the present, but how resilient it will be facing future
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challenges. Metropolitan areas that become “locked-in” to one economic trajectory or
governing paradigm will soon find themselves left behind.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of the resilience framework for
thinking about how metropolitan areas respond to challenges.1 At this point in its
applications to regional studies, resilience is more than a metaphor but less than a theory.
At best it is a conceptual framework that helps us to think about regions in new ways, i.e.,
dynamically and holistically. As derived from the field of systems ecology, the resilience
framework encourages us to think about regions as interconnected systems with extensive
feedback processes that must be understood for successful human intervention.
Ecologists have long understood that ecosystems cannot be studied by isolating parts of
the system and examining linear relations of cause and effect. Ecosystems function
through the interaction of complex processes operating at different scales and time
frames. These processes have powerful feedback effects that must be understood to
respond effectively to challenges. Take the example of a pest that is devastating crops.
Efforts to eliminate the pest may only cause the hosts for the pest to proliferate, making
the ecosystem more vulnerable to a future reinfestation of the pest. Isolated interventions
based on linear thinking can lead to less resilience, not more. Similarly, scholars on
metropolitan areas have increasingly argued that metropolitan policies cannot be treated
in isolation from each other. Treating traffic congestion by building more highways, for
example, may simply encourage more dispersed development, worsening the problem of
traffic congestion in the future.
The resilience framework developed out of ecological studies represents a revolt
against the mechanical and linear approach to scientific explanation modeled on
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Newtonian physics. A machine can be engineered to achieve equilibrium through human
controls and can operate quite independently from its environment. Plants on the other
hand cannot be controlled, they must be nurtured and they are highly sensitive to their
environment. The resilience framework encourages us to think about regions as complex
ecosystems with porous boundaries. Like ecosystems, metropolitan resilience cannot be
directly controlled or engineered like a machine. I argue that the resilience framework,
by requiring us to think about metropolitan areas as dynamic systems, generates insights
that could lead to more sophisticated and holistic ways to nurture resilient regions.
On the other hand, I will argue, the resilience framework, by understanding
regional governance through the lens of ecology, fails to understand the power of
sovereign political authority in setting the rules and structures within which regional
resilience occurs. We cannot overturn the laws of photosynthesis but state governments
can shape the rules and institutions that govern metropolitan areas. Power and conflict
are present in regional governance in ways they are not present in ecosystems. Politics
cannot be subsumed to a natural order of things. Indeed, I will argue, resilience is best
served by recognizing and protecting separate spheres of resilience in the public, private
and civic sectors, rather than subjecting them to a common ecological structure.
Rise of Resilience
Resilience has gained increasing prominence in the social sciences in the past
decade. Figure 1 shows the number of references to the term “resilience” as a topic in the
Social Science Citation Index for the past ten years.2 During that period, the annual
references to the word “resilience” increased by more than 400 percent. Of the total
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references (2,341) the various branches of psychology had by far the most (959).
Psychiatry adds another 351 references. (It is worthwhile to note that there were no
reported references to resilience in the political science literature.)
Resilience Articles
050
100150200250300350400450
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
TotalArticles Only
Figure 1. Citations of “Resilience” in the Social Science Citation Index, 1997-2007.
Psychology has long been interested in how people resume healthy functioning
after suffering from traumatic experiences, such as a wars, accidents, or life-threatening
diseases. Psychologists have shown that resilience is not something possessed by a few
extraordinary people; ordinary human beings have remarkable abilities to bounce back
from traumatic experiences.3 Resilience can be enhanced by internal processes, such as
prayer or exercise, and by external relations, such as enhancing one’s social networks
(American Psychological Association, n.d.; as reported in Foster n.d.).
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I focus here on the concept of resilience developed in the field of ecology. The
ecological idea of resilience stretches back twenty-five years to a seminal article by C. S.
Holling (1973). Ecological resilience differs from engineering resilience. Engineering
resilience is the ability of a system to return to equilibrium after a disturbance, like a
thermostat that returns the temperature in a house back to 70 degrees after an ice storm.
The ecological concept of resilience is based on multiple equilibria. This means that
ecosystems are able to respond to perturbations by changing their structure and
functioning to a new system. The idea of multiple equilibria fits metropolitan areas better
because regions must reinvent themselves in the face of challenges. When industrial jobs
disappear, regions cannot just reinvest in the manufacturing sector in the hope of
recreating a prosperous economy based on heavy industry. Instead they must reinvent
themselves to find a new profitable niche in the global economy.
The basic insight of behind the ecological concept of resilience is that ecosystems
operate according to complex processes of feedback or loops of circular causation.4
These loops are closed and therefore constitute a system. Order in the system “emerges”
out of these interactions; it cannot be understood by understanding the parts but by
understanding the properties of the system as a whole. Ecosystems self organize to
achieve balance or equilibrium: when one species starts to dominate, the gradual
depletion of its food sources blocks further expansion and the system comes back into
equilibrium. When ecosystems are disturbed by an outside force, scientists have found,
they are capable of restructuring themselves into a new equilibrium. An example would
be when a sustained drought causes some species and plants to decline and others to rise,
forming a new desert ecosystem with completely different dynamics. This process of
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resilience is aided by biodiversity: the more animal and plant species that exist in an
ecosystem, the greater the chance that a new equilibrium can be formed out of their
interaction.
Increasingly, ecologists have applied the concept of resilience not just to
biological systems but to what are called the socioecosystems, or the interaction of
human and natural systems.5 The basic idea is not just that humans need to understand
the emergent systems of resilience in nature and make policies that take into account
complex feedback effects. Instead, the human system of ecological management is
modeled on the same type of processes that bring order in nature. Applying the
framework of ecological resilience to human institutions and governance processes
generates paths to greater understanding, as well as dead ends.
Resolving the Paradox of Resilience
I often advise my students that they should concentrate on developing broad skills
in thinking and writing, instead of narrow technical skills. Increasingly, we have to be
lifelong learners, I say, and a broad liberal arts education will help them to adapt and
acquire new skills in a rapidly changing economy. On the other hand, as my students
often remind me, it is difficult to get that first job with just a liberal arts degree.
Employers are looking for marketable skills and for workers who have specialized
knowledge, both of which increase worker productivity. In truth, to succeed in the
modern economy you need both: technical skills and broad adaptive skills. Technical
skills and specialized knowledge makes you a more efficient and productive worker, but
it can lock you in to a part of the division of labor that can disappear over night in the
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winds of creative destruction that increasingly sweep across the economy. Workers need
to be adaptive as well as efficient. Similar paradoxes or contradictions plague
ecosystems or regions and the way that the ecological concept of resilience reconciles
these contradictions is one of its principal insights.
Across both natural and human systems, processes that increase the efficient
production of wealth and stored energy undermine resilience. For example, a forest with
one or a few dominant species of trees may prosper and accumulate a rich soil and dense
canopy that keeps out competitors. But if that one tree is eradicated by a pest, the lack of
biodiversity will hinder the ability of the forest to rejuvenate itself. Similarly,
maximizing the accumulation of capital requires regions to concentrate resources on
industries where they have a comparative advantage. Taking advantage of economies of
scale in production necessitates concentrating capital in one or a few production sites.
The result, however, is a regional economy lacking in diverse industries and vulnerable to
shifting consumer demand or competition in the dominant industry (Pittsburgh in the
1950s). A successful economy creates tight connections between the industry, society,
and the government but these same tight connections can make it difficult to shift public
policies and redeploy assets in the face of a crisis (Safford 2004). Similarly, lean
companies with just-on-time production and global supply chains, may be highly efficient
but they are vulnerable to disruptions (Sheffi 2007).
The ecological model of resilience reconciles this contradiction through the idea
of panarchy that captures the “evolutionary nature of adaptive cycles that are nested one
within each other across space and time” (Holling 2001, 396). (Figure 2) Systems can be
both efficient and innovative, highly connected and free to experiment, if these properties
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manifest themselves at different times and at different scales. Four different phases in the
cycle are represented in a two dimensional space that maps potential, or accumulated
wealth, and connectedness, or tight integration and hierarchical control. Long periods of
stasis are punctuated by short bursts of change and innovation. The conservation phase,
which corresponds to a mature forest or economy, is the time when the system reaches its
highest potential and connectedness. In the face of a challenge or stress, the system
enters a phase of release in which connections break down and hierarchical control
wanes. The loosening of central controls sets the stage for experiments to flourish.
Successful experiments then become the basis of a reorganization of the system. The
system then enters a phase of exploitation of the new forms of production in which the
new system becomes entrenched, ending in a longer conservative period of little change.
Figure 2. The adaptive cycle - in two dimensions, capital and connectedness, depicted as a figure 8 pattern of dynamics. Source: http://www.resalliance.org/564.php (accessed April 22, 2008).
In ecology a good example is a mature forest whose dense canopy discourages
competitors and whose accumulated dry kindling is “an accident waiting to happen.” A
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bolt of lightening sets off a forest fire which sweeps through the forest breaking down
connections and opening up the space for a great diversity of new trees and plants to
thrive. A period of creative experimentation ends with a new equilibrium, different from
the prior one. As exploitation gives way to a conservative stage the new system creates
the seeds of its own destruction or at least vulnerability to outside disturbances as certain
large species of plants and animals begin to dominate. The basic idea is that ecosystems
maintain their resilience by going through these cycles. If they get stuck at the
conservation stage, often from human interventions, such as fire suppression, they can
become locked in and even more vulnerable over time to outside disturbances that can
disrupt the whole system (forest fires that are widespread and highly destructive).
The tension between efficiency and innovation, tight connections and freedom to
experiment, is also reconciled by being situated at different scales. Basically, the slower,
longer term processes operate at larger scales and the faster, short-term processes operate
at smaller scales. Usually, the larger scales processes dominate and shape the outcomes
of the smaller processes. Thus, for example, climate, geomorphology, and large plants
and species dominate over finer grained biochemical processes. But at times that require
rapid innovation and change, the lower levels can exercise a “revolt” function, reacting
back on the higher levels and changing their structure and function. A resilient system is
one where these smaller scale processes are able to deal with the stressor without having
to reorganize the larger scale structures.
In the case of regions, markets correspond to the faster, more localized parts of
the system that are constantly adjusting to change. Local governments represent an
intermediate level while the central government and larger culture represent the larger
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structures that adapt more slowly. A resilient region would be one in which markets and
local political structures continually adapt to changing environmental conditions and only
when these processes fail, often due to misguided intervention by higher level authorities
which stifle their ability to innovate, is the system forced to alter the big structures. A
good example would be federal urban renewal policies that generated perverse incentives
for localities to favor commercial development over housing, resulting in the disruption
of the social fabric in many cities, fueling urban riots. This resulted in the change of
federal policies from categorical grants to block grants, such as the passage of the
Community Development Block Grant in 1974, which freed up local governments to
experiment and develop more balanced urban policies.
Understanding Regional Resilience as a Dynamic, Multi-Tiered System
The foregoing discussion raises the question: can models generated by empirical
research on ecosystem resilience be applied to human systems such as metropolitan
areas? Can (and should) human systems operate under the same as principles as natural
systems? In this section I explore the positive contributions that ecological thinking
about resilience can contribute to understanding the resilience of metropolitan areas. In
the following section I examine the flaws in applying ecological thinking to human
systems.
First, it is important to reiterate that the ecological resilience when applied to
human systems functions more as a conceptual framework than as a theory or a set of
testable hypotheses. In their essay linking social and ecological systems, Berkes and
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Folke (1998, 15) defend the value of conceptual frameworks by quoting Rappoport
(1985, 256):
Conceptual frameworks are neither models nor theories. Models describe how
things work, whereas theories explain phenomena. Conceptual frameworks do
neither; rather they help to think about phenomena, to order material, revealing
patterns – and pattern recognition typically leads to models and theories.
Ultimately, the value of the ecological concept of resilience will rest on its ability to
suggest new hypotheses about regional resilience that can be tested by social scientists.
1. The Systems Approach to Regions
Why regions? This is the first question asked of studies of regional resilience.
The ecological literature suggests a way to think about the importance of the regional
scale. An ecosystem is a habitat characterized by extensive feedback loops among plants
and animals that create a complex but orderly system. The systems approach takes an
endogenous point of view: you can understand metropolitan areas in terms of their
internal relations. External forces are treated as exogenous variables that generate
stresses or challenges that the system must adapt to.
Are metropolitan areas usefully viewed as systems? Clearly, larger-scale forces,
like globalization and national policies, impact regions, and conventional wisdom would
argue that new telecommunication technologies are rendering places less important. At
the same time, there is considerable evidence that important processes interact with each
other in systematic ways within regions. Pastor, Lester, and Scoggins (2007) provide
objective evidence that “regions matter.” According to their data analysis, regional
economies are not converging toward a national mean; increasingly, regions vary in their
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economic performance, suggesting that factors internal to the region are driving growth.
Manuel Castells (2000) argues that the space of places has been replaced with the “space
of flows”. Under the space of flows metropolitan areas are changing their functions but
they have not been rendered obsolete. In many ways metropolitan agglomerations are
more important than ever as centers of innovation and planning in the modern economy.
The Census Bureau defines metropolitan areas in terms of commuter sheds, which
can be thought of as analogous to watersheds. Labor markets and housing markets
operate at the regional scale. Regions can be viewed as “high reverberation” systems
where activity in one area or sector impacts processes in another. According to linear
models of cause and effect rooted in Newtonian mechanics, the effect is always
proportional to the cause. One of the insights of systems theory is that small
interventions can cause large effects (the butterfly effect) and large interventions can
have very small effects. A good example of this at the regional level is that massive
busing programs designed to increase interaction among racial groups in schools can
have very little impact if it results in whites fleeing central city schools for suburban
white districts.
Policy interventions must understand these complex feedback loops in order to be
effective. Consider the example of CDCs building new affordable housing in central
cities. In metropolitan areas where household formation lags growth in the regional
housing supply, the effect may be only to cause housing in other parts of the city to be
abandoned, undermining revitalization efforts. Policy silos need to talk to one another
because the region is an integrated system. Job training for inner city residents makes
little sense if the workers have no transportation to the available jobs in the suburbs. Job
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training needs to be coordinated with transportation and housing policy. And in the
classic case of feedback effects, massive expenditures on expanding highway capacity
may only have a tiny effect on traffic congestion. According to Anthony Downs’s “triple
convergence,” in response to the added capacity travelers will change the times, the mode
of travel, and their route generating more traffic and cancelling out any reduction in
congestion (Downs 2004). A systems approach to metropolitan resilience makes sense.
2. Resilience as a Dynamic Process
The concept of resilience forces attention on change. In contrast to the
engineering concept of resilience, ecological resilience, with its notion of multiple
equilibria, points to the need of metropolitan areas to constantly reinvent themselves in
the face of challenges. Given the porous boundaries of metropolitan areas, the constant
flow of goods and people in and out, and the turbulence of national and international
markets, it is not enough for metropolitan areas to simply maintain the status quo.
Metropolitan areas must constantly reinvent themselves or they will fall further and
further behind.
A key issue for resilience studies is understanding how metropolitan areas move
from path dependence to path divergence. Ecological studies provides some insight into
this issue by emphasizing that diversity of animals and plants helps ecosystems to adapt
by providing them with more alternatives. Regional economists have long advocated the
need for diverse economies that will be less vulnerable to shake-ups on one industry.
Similarly, companies with diverse and redundant suppliers will be less vulnerable to an
interruption in the supply chain (Sheffi 2005). Chapple and Lester have begun to
operationalize the concepts of path dependency and divergence. They compare the
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performance of metropolitan areas in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that if a metropolitan
area declined in the 1980s and then turns that around in the 1990s, it is “transformative,”
i.e., it has reversed path dependency. After empirically identifying regions that were able
to turn the corner on important outcomes, it may be possible to study particular cases in
more depth to document how the region was able to be resilient. It is precisely these
kinds of in-depth studies of the sources of regional resilience that are lacking.
3. Resilience is Not an Asset
Ecological resilience also requires us to think of resilience not as a resource or an
asset but as a process of change. The success of regions is often viewed by scholars as
based on their accumulated capital – whether that be financial capital, physical capital
(built environment), or social capital. Thus, Robert Putnam (1993) argued that the
success of regional governments in Northern Italy was based on the accumulation of
social capital going back centuries. By contrast, in her study of eight metropolitan areas,
Kate Foster (2000) found an intriguing disjunction between deep stores of regional
capital and success on regional outcomes such as economic performance or social equity.
Just as a forest must loosen tight connections in order to permit reorganization into a new
better adapted ecosystem, metropolitan areas that fail to loosen tight connections that
bound them to the earlier structures will remain brittle and lack resilience. From the
viewpoint of resilience, social capital can just as easily be the problem as the solution. In
his study of successful adaptation to deindustrialization in Allentown versus failure to
adapt in Youngstown, Sean Safford (2004) argues that what mattered was not the
accumulation of social capital but its configuration. In Allentown, the structure of civic
relations facilitated action across social, political, and economic divisions, thus,
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promoting a resilient response to the traumatic loss of industry. In Youngstown the
social networks were ingrown and tied to sunset industries, supporting continuing
commitments to policies supporting shrinking industries.
Limits of the Ecological Approach to Resilience
The basic insight of the ecological concept of resilience is that human institutions
should mimic the resilient processes of nature. Resilience in nature arises from nested
sets of adaptive cycles that operate at different scales and different time frames. The
ecological concept of resilience stresses self-organization among decentralized structures
over intentional hierarchical controls. Indeed, the term panarchy, which is used to
describe the structure of ecological resilience, was chosen to avoid the term hierarchy
which is “so burdened by the rigid, top-down nature of its common meaning (Holling,
Gunderson & Peterson 2002, 74). In a panarchy, there are different scales at which
adaptation occurs but the higher and larger scales are not privileged; indeed, panarchy
celebrates the fast-moving decentralized structures that are the source of system
adaptability. Human governance should mimic the disorganized, emergent order of
nature. “When the scales of human affairs become decoupled from those of nature,
signals of change are eliminated and the learning that such signals can generate begins to
whither” (Gunderson & Holling 2002, xxii).
Ecological resilience is fundamentally anti-statist. Ecological resilience validates
forms of governance that are fundamentally anti-political in the sense of rejecting the
power of the sovereign state to manage resilience. At the same time, ecological thinkers
are often critical of economists who think that environmental sustainability can be
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achieved if we just “get the prices right” (Gunderson & Holling 2002, xxi) Rejecting
both the state and the market, ecological thinkers embrace social processes of consensual
decision making and network governance. I argue that the diminishment of the role of
the state and political conflict in favor of consensual social networks ends up being
profoundly conservative, reinforcing the status quo. A diminished role for the state does
indeed promote rapid innovation, but far from leading to resilience this can cause
profound disorganization and social stress. I illustrate my argument with examples from
the foreclosure crisis.
From Natural Laws to Human Laws
Ecologists are deferential to the emergent order of nature. Over and over again,
they caution against the hubris of scientific resource management trying to control nature.
The result of partial interventions, such as managing the sustainable yield of one crop, is
to reduce biodiversity and undermine resilience. Scientific management violates the
emergent order of nature. However, the laws that govern human affairs are not natural,
they are man-made. To defer to them is to defer to the status quo. The ecological
literature on human systems of resilience almost never analyzes the background
conditions that shape regional governance and resilience. We do not start from a state of
nature but from a civil society in which resilience is shaped by laws, policies, and very
human institutions. Suspicious of any central authority, ecological models of resilience
ignore the ways that the central government shapes markets, local governments, and even
cultural values. When applied to human systems, ecological resilience overlooks the
crucial role of sovereign authorities in both nurturing and undermining resilience.
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The current foreclosure crisis illustrates the crucial role of central authority. The
main cause of the rash of foreclosures was a 1980 federal law that repealed the usury, or
interest-rate, limits on first-lien mortgages and thus set in motion the rash of subprime
lending (Gramlich 2007). The opening in the forest canopy of federal regulation ushered
in a wave of innovation in the mortgage industry, introducing new instruments, such as
ARMS, balloon payments, teaser rates, liar loans, piggyback loans, etc. From the
viewpoint of ecological theory this proliferation of new mortgage instruments apparently
increased biodiversity and thus resilience. But in fact these new instruments were used to
dupe consumers into loans that were against their interest. Wall Street investment firms
were also highly innovative, inventing complex forms of mortgage-backed securities that
enabled predatory lenders to off load their fraudulent mortgages and acquire new funds to
spread the problem further. Resilience in the mortgage industry undermined resilience
among households. Ecological thinkers cannot be blamed for the foreclosure crisis, of
course, but there is almost nothing in their thinking that would suggest that a decline in
central regulations could lead to such disastrous results.
The Levels of Analysis Problem
As much as ecologists have tried to make it a scientific concept, resilience has
strong ideological overtones. As applied to individuals, resilience, with its connotations
of self-reliance, is a quintessentially American concept (Pendall, Foster & Cowell 2007,
4). Resilience is often understood as the ability of an individual, or in our case a region,
to pull itself up by its bootstraps and reinvent itself in the face of external challenges. By
failing to recognize how different levels of analysis interact, this understanding of
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resilience is ideological. Resilience tends to treat stressors as generated by basically
unpredictable forces in nature, such as storms, climate change, or forest fires. A forest
cannot prevent fires or stop climate change. Humans can.
As we saw above, the rise in subprime lending was not an act of nature, but the
result of federal deregulation of lenders. Moreover, research has shown that banks that
signed lending agreements with communities were much less likely to issue subprime or
predatory loans (Casey 2007). Bank lending agreements were promoted by the
Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that made it possible for community-based
organizations to file legal challenges against lenders for failing to meet the credit needs of
their communities. In other words, central government regulations empowered
community-based organizations to innovate new ways of meeting the credit needs of the
community outside of predatory lending. Resilience in human systems has as much to do
with shaping the challenges as responding to them.
With regard to the regional response to mortgage foreclosures, clearly localities
lack the resources to respond adequately to the crisis. Federal and state action is needed
to empower localities to respond adequately, partly because the problem is most severe in
low-income and minority communities. Moreover, state laws control the legal process of
foreclosure, setting the time frame in which borrowers must act to restructure the
mortgage to prevent foreclosure. Localities need both resources and a supportive legal
framework from higher levels of government in order to be resilient in the face of the
foreclosure crisis. They can not do it themselves.
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Resilience is an Inherently Normative Concept
Resilience always has an object. Resilience can only be understood with
reference to some desirable outcome. Resilience toward what? For whom? The
ecological concept of resilience essentially finesses the normative question. The norm or
goal of resilience in the ecological literature is sustainability, which is rarely debated or
questioned. The definition of sustainability is the ability to meet the needs of the present
generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
The emphasis in the literature is not on the “needs” of the present generation but on
processes of production that use renewable resources and close the loop of production so
that all waste is recycled. What is important is the proper functioning of the whole, not
the well being of the parts or the just distribution of the burdens and rewards of
resilience.
Westley et al (2002, 103) begin one chapter by quoting an anonymous source:
“There are in nature no rewards or punishments, just consequences.” In human systems
there definitely are rewards and punishments. Some people win and other people lose.
The distributive consequences of resilience cannot be ignored. In the study of resilience
in human systems we are from agreement on goals. Researchers are forced to choose
among desirable outcomes and defend their choices. Resilience in human systems is
inherently conflictual, or political.
The ecological framework of resilience tends to supported consensual, network
forms of regional governance. In an article cited by ecologists (Alberti, et al 2003), Innes
and Booher (1999, 152) put it this way: “Experience has shown that many consensus-
building processes have properties similar to complex systems – self-organization,
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decentralization, and inventiveness…. Because consensus building maps so effectively
onto these complex systems, it can be a particularly powerful planning method.”
Consensus building may work in the case of watershed planning, where the costs of
inaction often weigh heavily on all stakeholders, but in the case of the foreclosure crisis
relying on consensus may undermine resilience rather than foster it. If the goal is to keep
as many households as possible in their homes, then resources will need to be distributed
from taxpayers to at-risk homeowners or bankruptcy laws will have to be revised to force
lenders to renegotiate loans. Either way, some people will win and others will lose and if
we wait for consensus inaction will most likely be the outcome.
Conclusion: A Three-Sector Model of Regional Resilience
The conceptual framework of resilience as developed by ecologists has strengths
and weaknesses for the study of resilience in metropolitan areas. Clearly, metropolitan
areas are complex systems with powerful feedback loops that must be understood by
policymakers and resilience requires adaptive cycles that periodically break the hold of
tight connections that stifle innovation. But the conceptual framework of resilience
ignores the role of sovereign authorities in setting the rules for resilience, the need for
researchers to make tough normative choices about desired end states, and the
inevitability of political conflicts in resilience processes. Instead of summarizing the
arguments made in the paper, I will end with a conjecture about a three-tiered model of
regional resilience.
Resilience can be understood as a process that takes place in three sectors:
private, public, and civic (or nonprofit). Each of these has a characteristic mode for
21
promoting adaptation to challenges, as well as characteristic failures or rigidities.
Regional resilience is most effective when each sector operates according to its own
principals and is not contaminated by the processes of the other sector. In other words,
resilient regional governance is not a holistic process or system, as is suggested by
ecological theory, but requires maintaining borders between spheres of resilience.
1. Civic (Nonprofit) Sector: Critical of both markets and governments, ecological
theory places civic networks and consensus decision making at the center of resilience.
The basic idea is that a diversity of stakeholders can devise innovative solutions that
transcend the limits of self-interest. Innovative win-win solutions are possible if
stakeholders collaborate. There is no doubt that many innovative ideas do emerge out of
diverse networks in civil society. Pressed by CRA requirements, for example, banks
have met with CBOs and other neighborhood interests to devise creative lending products
that meet the needs of low and moderate-income lenders without compromising bank
profits.
On the other hand, civil society can become unresilient or locked when infected
with “cronyism”: networks become ingrown, self-replicating, and develop a “group-
think” that precludes creative and resilient solutions. When these civic networks take
over the functions of government, they empower the already connected and distribute
benefits based on particularistic criteria. Salamon (1995) calls this philanthropic
particularism. Similarly, if nonprofits operate according to the principles of the private
market, they lose their ability to innovate. Randy Stoecker (1997) argues that CDCs
often succumb to the pressure of the marketplace and give up their advocacy function in
pursuit of real estate development.
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2. Private Markets: If civil society represents an intermediate level in speed and
flexibility, then private markets are clearly the fastest and most rapidly innovative level
of resilience. Properly functioning private markets are highly resilient because they
motivate decision makers to respond quickly to changing technology and consumer
preferences. Mobile investors shift investments quickly out of dying industries into
sunrise industries. Markets aid individual resilience by giving consumers more choice.
For example, the ability of private lenders to put foreclosed properties back on the market
as quickly as possible so they can be occupied and pay taxes is an important part of
resilience in the face of the foreclosure crisis.
On the other hand, markets can also get “locked in” to patterns that undermine
resilience. In the parlance of welfare economics, these are called market failures. When
market actors behave like civic actors, achieving consensus to advance their interests
through collaboration, they undermine resilience. Competition and individual self-
interest clearly have an important place in regional resilience but they can undermine
resilience if infected by the principals of the other sectors. Policymakers must be aware
of the levels of analysis problem. Market resilience or rapid innovation can undermine
household resilience. Unregulated or weakly regulated mortgage brokers, for example,
seduced lenders into loan products that did not make households more resilient, by
building equity through homeownership, but instead made them vulnerable to economic
insecurity or job losses.
3. Public Sector: The public sector represents the broadest scale and the slowest
moving parts of resilient systems. Competitive party processes enable democracies to
innovate in the face of challenges. When control over the government changes parties,
23
the opportunity exists to transform the rules that govern resilience. The job of
government policies is to provide a framework within which market and civic actors can
do their jobs, each within their own sphere, to adapt to challenges. Government builds
the infrastructure of resilience. Government action must be guided by public interest
considerations, governing for the entire society, not for any partial interests. The set of
policies that emerged from the New Deal, such as FHA loan guarantees, and from the
1970s, such as the CRA Act, empowered private lenders and civic actors to better of
adapt to challenges.
When government operates according to private interests or requires consensual
decision making to legislate, it loses its ability to promote resilience. Government policy
can be captured by policy monopolies or subgovernments that insulate policy from the
reach of the competitive party system (Baumgartner & Jones 1993). When governments
rely upon collaboration among networks to make policy instead of legitimate authority
that legislates for the entire society, then the powerful become entrenched and resilience
wanes (Lowi 1979). This is essentially what happened when federal regulators became
captive of the financial services industry and failed to grasp the effects of deregulation on
households, communities, and even the economy as a whole.
In conclusion, each of the three sectors is needed to maximize resilience. The
private sector maximizes the resilience of individuals, the civic sector of communities,
and the public sector of the society as a whole. Without a balance between the three
sectors, controlled ultimately by a central authority, society will either become rigid or
innovation at one level will undermine resilience at other levels. In short, resilience does
24
not require merging human systems with nature in one integrated system but requires
maintaining spheres of resilience with carefully guarded borders.
25
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1 As a member of the Working Group of the Building Resilient Regions project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, I have been especially aided in thinking about resilience by the work of Kate Foster, Rolf Pendall, and Margaret Cowell. To learn more about the project, visit our website: http://www.iurd.ced.berkeley.edu/brr/index.html. 2 The Social Science Citation Index describes a topic search as: "Searches for topic terms in the following fields within a record: Title, Abstract, Author Keyword, Keywords Plus®.” 3 Likewise, cities have also shown remarkable ability throughout history to recover from disasters. See Vale and Campanella 2005. 4 For an introduction to feedback thinking in the social sciences, see Richardson 1999. 5 The effort to create an integrated theory of natural and human systems was let by a 5-year collaboration among social scientists funded by the MacArthur Foundation called the Resilience Project. The results are published in Gunderson and Holling 2002 and on the website: http://www.resalliance.org/reports.